Power to the laptop

More computer hardware related hijinks. You may recall the tedious antics last year when hughanchor the desktop computer developed various faults and kept rebooting in the middle of things. This was eventually traced to some bad memory and a suspect motherboard, which got replaced, and everything has been going swimmingly.

Well, for the last week or two, mugwump2 (a nice averatec laptop) has been having problems: the power supply would suddenly drop off, leaving it running on its (pretty weedy) battery). Or it would just die suddenly as if it had been switched off. A little bit of rooting around on an Averatec forums website showed that this is a well known problem with this otherwise pretty decent laptop.

So I called up the customer service folks, and had a little chat. The nice gent was trying to brush me off since the machine is out of warranty, but I pointed out that this was a fault in the manufacturing of the laptop, and he quickly gave in and agreed to service it. I got that holy grail of hardware returns, an RMA number. Now I just have to take a backup of the hard drive, since I know they will steal all my mp3s and then delete it, and then get it sent off to them. Gah. Why can't stuff just work, all the time and forever?